The database of the Plant Resources Center holdings of vascular plant specimens collected in Mexico forms a node of the on-line Red Mundial de Información Sobre Biodiversidad (World Information Network on Biodiversity), or REMIB, a biodiversity specimen database run by the Mexican federal biodiversity commission CONABIO (Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad). Data for over 200,000 specimens from the TEX and LL herbaria of the PRC are available on-line and can be accessed only through the REMIB interface. The databasing of this extensive collection was accomplished under the direction of Dr. José Panero, Associate Director of the PRC and Associate Professor in the Section of Integrative Biology of the University of Texas at Austin, with funding from CONABIO and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Most of the data enterers were employees of CONABIO.

Mexican type specimens from TEX and LL are not included in this database but can be accessed separately, with images, at Typetitle.html.

The REMIB database is very powerful and allows multiple included databases to be queried at the same time. To query just the PRC specimens, follow these instructions:

  • Go to English Interface or Spanish Interface
  • Click on "Access to the Information" near the top.
  • Read and accept the conditions for use.
  • The next page is the search page, mostly self-explanatory. Many find the "predefined" format to be the most useful. IMPORTANT: The only trick to this page is this: After filling in the needed search parameters, you must click on "Vascular Plants and Germplasm", which will open a list of herbaria and other collections. Then, click in the farthest-left box by "The Herbarium of the University of Texas...". (You can click in boxes by other herbaria to get a search of multiple herbaria--usually this works well, but if you run into problems, limit the search to one herbarium.) You need to click one or more of these boxes before hitting the "distributed query" button.


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